I don’t know about anyone else but the holidays are usually exhausting. There’s a lot of stuff going on in what feels like an instant. Lots of travel, lots of preparation, and sometimes some misery despite what the holidays are supposed to be about. As a result, I am focusing on a more casual oriented list today. Although this article will go up after the bird-centric holiday, it kinda ties in as people travel to go see Mom:
Hero
Mother Misery
Weapons (49)
4x Arm Blade of Augelmir
4x Black Amnesty
2x Perdition’s Blade
4x Sinister Revenge
4x Whispering Blade of Slaying
4x Wraith Scythe
4x Edge of Oblivion
3x Wub’s Cursed Hexblade
4x Reclaimed Ashkandi
4x Maimgor’s Bite
4x Blackout Truncheon
4x Millennium Blade
4x Kelen’s Dagger of Escape
Quests (11)
4x What Illidan Wants, Illidan Gets
3x You Are Rakh’likh, Demon
4x Thieving Little Pluckers
Total cards in deck: 60
Yup it is Mother Misery! One of the original memes the WoWtcg has to offer. She has been at the periphery for as long as she has been on cardboard and like many other unique heroes is one that you should always think about when evaluating new cards. These heroes break the rules in a number of ways so it opens up a whole different world of options. Let’s break it down shall we?
Don’t Talk About My Mama!
First and foremost you have to access that Mother Misery (MM) is going to have some trouble with staying alive. Unfortunately, while 6 x weapons sounds awesome you are painted into a corner defensively. Best defense is a great offense or something like that. This is one of the areas that newer cards help out an aging archtype. Kelen’s Dagger of Escape is a Warcraft 3 item that grants the carrier an activatable “blink” or short range teleport. It was a pretty useful item in the RTS days and it continues to provide utility now. While you aren’t likely to punch anyone with it you do get to dodge a hit from opposing attacks. Not all attacks for the turn, or even a couple, just a single combat. This isn’t Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, just a more modest leftover turkey sandwich if you will. However, combined with gravy such as Black Amnesty and you have something a little more palatable. For a little more crunch you can toss in Blackout Truncheon and you have a set of 2 drops that can help you reach later turns. While each component of this trifecta isn’t independently going to keep your goose from being permanently cooked, they add a good layer of redundancy.
While MM can wield everything from a spatula to Edge of Oblivion it isn’t going to matter if you don’t have time to start carving up the opposing bird. You’ll often be on the ropes with this deck and like choosing who made the best pie, an error is judgment will have grave repercussions. This is where Wraith Scythe can come in to help carry the weight. You are not going to be dodging all the inbound strikes so you really need a way to recover as you probably want to race to the table…er finish line. That one got away from me.
Don’t Make Mommy Angry
Can’t play defense all the time though. MM sure loves her cutlery. Another more recent prospect lends a helping hand to a Mama in need:
Millenium Blade
Equipment – 1h Weapon – Sword Melee (1)
Dual Wield
While you control another Weapon, this weapon has +1 ATK, and you pay [1] less to strike with it.
Free swings seem pretty good. If you have no other weapons you’re likely in a bad enough spot anyway. The only drawback is basically that your entire curve starts at 2. Whispering Blade of Slaying isn’t ideal but it is a 1 cost weapon which would allow you to swing for 2 on turn 2 with Millenium Blade. Moving on to the subject of gigantic carving knives we have Reclaimed Ashkandi. This allows you to not only punch harder but also remove things without feeling terrible about it due to granting smash. It also costs only 3, which is important. Unfortunately just like setting up for company you will have your resources stretched to the limit with this deck. There are a number of ways to try and reduces costs, but at the end of the day if you want the nice silverware you are going to pay for it. Then you may keep paying for the upkeep of it in the form of strike costs. Efficiently utilizing the resources you have available is key.
Sometimes a little chopping is required and MM comes prepared for that as well. Wraith Scythe has already been brought up but it is worth calling attention to the soothing axe again. While you generally will not actually chop, chop, chop with this one it still is going to put in work. It pairs especially well with Edge of Oblivion and Maimgor’s Bite. Do you want to heal? Do you want to take a bite juicy bite out of your opponent? Have fun, here you can have both! Edge allows you to keep applying pressure without taxing your aforementioned strained resources turn after turn. Maimgor’s Bite offers the same long term savings while offering the chance to wombo your opponent out by turning butter knives into chainsaws! Just be careful, texture is important. Not a lot of food tastes great as paste which either of these options can turn enemies into.
There’s always a one-upper as a story teller at every family gathering and that’s what Sinister Revenge is. “Oh yeah I did that, plus more”, this experience won’t be quite as tedious though. An Askandi or even a Perdition’s Blade would be happy to do their part to make the entire experience more enjoyable for our over-exaggerator.
Always Help With Cleaning Up
No toys at the table. Especially your opponents. Arm Blade of Augelmir isn’t a great solution but as discussed with our defensive tools, you just need to have enough time to get a good spread of weapons. Being instant and a 0 strike cost are a great side dish to the main course of choppy-stabby iron and steel the rest of the deck offers as a main course. Although it rarely happens at the dinner table, sometimes you truly can talk to someone and convince them to join your side. Wub’s Cursed Hexblade can help you make a very convincing case if you’re going second, if you have to get the first word in then maybe you just shout them down (and off the table).
There are of course Abomination Knuckles available to MM as well for those tough to remove stains and caked on armor/items enemies always show up with. No need to even soak everything in the sink first! Unfortunately not many people want to clean up so your options are very limited and often it comes down to doing it the hard way. There are a few things you can run to remove allies, but barring a whirlwind of cleaning from Glyphtrace Ritual Knight or The Bringer of Death you are limited on tools for dealing with opposing permanents. Battle Mage’s Baton can certainly put in a lot of effort and Jihn’rohk takes no guff from anyone, but maybe just ending the game faster is better.
Can You just Run to the Store and….
The quests are rounded out by what you’d expect from a demon. Both Rakh’likh and What Illidan are staples for this sort of hero. Bane of the Illidari is just a cheap way to get to tastier options. This is where the limitations of MM show up again. Dating herself just a bit, Mama here doesn’t even know what locations are and has to always call up her kids to explain what those new fangled green bordered cards do. Eye of the Storm is left out in the cold as a result. Which really is a shame as this deck would love to have that available. Also, Mom absolutely hates the cold and is going to make you go out and shovel in that Blizzard. There are pretty common silver bullets being carried around by a number of decks because they aren’t really silver bullets, just really strong cards. In our case though, you are in real bad shape if they come down on the other side of the board.
Almost Time to Hang the Lights
If there was a wishlist for this deck I think it’d go something like this:
- More cheap (1 or 0) cost melee weapons
- More life-steal melee weapons
- More cost reducing melee weapons
- MORE MELEE WEAPONS
- World peace
Maybe not necessarily in that order.
The deck is really fun but it can be tough. It is a definitive meta call and you lock yourself out of a lot of things like locations, or master heroes, or abilities, or…
You get the idea.
Like many other decklists in the wild west that is classic it MM seems as though she is merely a card or three away from being “there”. The big difficulty is that you can’t really provide her the tools she needs without making something hugely overpowered for the normal classes. For example, what if there was a melee weapon that was a mini-jihn’rohk? Maybe it only destroys abilities, or only allies, or whatever. That would probably be absurd in any other class. She sorely needs it though. If there was a weapon that prevented the first damage each turn or something that’d be great too as you could then have a better answer to Blizzard. There may be a build that is more controlling and plays to the strengths of The Bringer of Death and Battlemage’s Baton. I initially constructed this as I was enamored with the idea of Reclaimed Ashkandi, however it could work the other way. My main concern would be why are you playing that instead of a more traditional control deck? I think you’d quickly run out of spots as you can’t just soak damage until turn 5 when you might get Glyphtrace online. If you try to face-check everything with swords and daggers you are even more reliant on Wraith Scythe for stabilization. Whichever way you go you’ll end up resetting your board as well with the sweeps. There are clunky options such as Lockjaw, Staff of Ammunae, or Royal Scepter of Terenas II to try and heal yourself but you aren’t gaining much ground.
There are actually a lot of toys you could include such as the various warglaives all the way through the jankiest jank that ever janked like Mithrios, BronzeBeard’s Legacy. We would love to hear how other people are constructing Mother Misery decks, so if you have a build for her or any other build for that matter feel free to share it on our facebook page!
Until next time keep slinging cards for Azeroth!
Random('s) Thoughts 